The Latest In Anecdote

Notable Birthdays: 1995

The BA Society formed during Short Term at the Women’s College I attended Freshman Year. Short term, for those ignorant of the rightfully antiquated 4-1-4 semester system, was a month long “mini-term” in which students were (in theory) encouraged to devote their time to one intensive course, research project or internship. In practice, short term allowed the roughly 75 % of campus rich enough to do a fashion internship in Paris or study the efficacy of Hawaiian Tropic Sunscreen firsthand from Emily’s dad’s yacht in the Caymans or Mary Ellis’ Mom’s condo in Vail, while the rest of us took the sort of dozy, no-stakes classes common in day camps for summer nerds—Medieval Italics, Improv Theatre: Past Present and You, Feminism in “Star Trek.” I took, “The Counterculture and Those Counter to It,” which was taught by a woman with Bernadette Peters’ hair, a serious Eileen Fisher habit and tendency to relate the upheavals of the late 1960s to her ex-husband’s myriad deficiencies as both husband and lover. We read Abbe Hoffman and Tom Wolfe and wrote journal entries about how the Woodstock documentary made us feel. One whole class was devoted to discussion of how much we admired Angela Davis’ earrings.

Suffice to say, I had plenty of time on my hands. And so did my other friends stuck on campus. These included C, who’d been the first friend I made on campus, L, who I’d met doing theatre, sort of, and M, who lived in the single at the end of the hall. We were an odd mix (even odder than my thirteenth birthday party) that in any other circumstance (and almost certainly in a larger college), would have maybe never hung out together. What we shared mostly consisted of the Womens College itself (about which we didn’t even agree internally), smoking and our ability to have a surprisingly good time at the Waffle House. C & I had already been hanging out a lot off-campus downtown with the bunch of the music fans, local bands and artfully disaffected townies that more or less constituted “The Scene” as it existed in Roanoke, Virginia circa 1995. Our friend, Killer, a skateboarder (ironically dubbed for his baby face and small stature) somehow came into keys for an old Elks Lodge, where we wiled away the winter hours playing pool, posturing, and trying not to behave like nice young ladies from that nice women’s college. We weren’t supposed to be there, and we definitely weren’t supposed to be drinking the beer in the fridge with Killer and his friends. But what else were we going to do? We’d already exhausted the goodwill of our one friend with a Fake ID and we kept getting stymied by snowstorms in the Shenandoah whenever we tried to drive up to DC.

I don’t remember how or when we came up with the BA (stands for Bad Ass, with ample irony) Society, except that I’m pretty sure The Lodge was involved. Virginia has a long and storied history of collegiate secret societies. My father may have even tried to start one during his tenure at University of Virginia, back in the era Professor Eileen Fisher liked to compare to her ex-husband’s sexual prowess. We appointed ourselves as member/officers, invented a completely ridiculous secret handshake and preceded to break the cardinal rule of any secret society worth its salt by telling everyone we knew about it And it became yet another way to unite our otherwise disparate group, consisting of : opinionated Texan self-described “waver” with a weakness for poetry and Dr. Pepper, a theatrical Massachusetts hippie who professed to actually enjoying Phish concerts, a blonde Virginian who spoke German and dressed like Holly Golightly and an underachieving, over-literate, prep-school-educated wanna-be punk rocker, straight off the mean, leafy, scenic streets of Asheville, North Carolina. The BA Society was the banner we traveled under like a super group or a group of superheroes. And that would be a pretty good analogy if, say, the Avengers were four eighteen-year-old girls whose combined superpowers were impossible late-night caffeine intake and infinite snark. We may not have been able to save the world, but we could fill a Honda Civic with asphyxiation levels of cigarettes smoke in less than fifteen seconds while dancing in our seats up I-81 in a snowstorm.

I could think of no better way for the BA Society to solidify itself than with a group road-trip, and no occasion more wanting of such a voyage than my nineteenth birthday. I had a new (old) car—the afore-mentioned, smoke-drenched Honda Civic—a Mom willing to host three desperate characters and a notion that I might recreate the magic of my eighteenth birthday. [1] Specifically, we would all stay at the house, drink wine like grown-ups, talk all night and go up for the epic, Vegas-casino-with-ice-an-butter-sculptures brunch[2] at the giant resort hotel up the block from Mom’s house the next morning.

We took off on a Thursday afternoon and drove to a roots-music themed nightclub, roughly halfway home, in not-so-metropolitan Winston-Salem to watch a mysteriously popular ska band ride one of the mid-90s most regrettable trends into mass popularity. None of us were huge fans of the band, in fact, we probably disliked it equally, each for our own separate reasons. The club was gross, crowded with the kind of baggy cargo-shorted, tribal-tattooed baseball capped disaster that traditionally presaged bar fights, casual racism and someone named Jeremy spilling beer all over your shoe while trying to touch your boob. M wore a silk blouse and pearls and complained at the lack of espresso machine. L and I stood in the corner on the far side of the stage watching a huge amp teeter ominously over us from its implausible perch atop the stack. We emerged, sweaty, uncrushed by amp and vaguely euphoric in that particular galloping eighteen-year-old way. We drove west on I-40 and took a room at a motel on the western edge of the Piedmont. Next door was a truck stop, where we ordered breakfast at 3am and, for maybe two hours, pretended we were a touring rock band called Condiment Chaos (the A was an anarchy sign) that constantly struggled with inter-band personal dramas, exacerbated by our track-suited d-bag manager, who was always trying to get one of us to go solo as a pop sensation. We did our best to sound blasé and worldly which was totally belied by the fact that we were literally playing pretend. Eighteen feels well down the road to adulthood when you’re eighteen, but you can still catch childhood in the rearview, so close you don’t even have to turn your head.

The next day we drove into the mountains. I took my friends on a tour of my hometown, complete with high school roundabout and downtown walkaround. We met up with a few of my friends who had been at my eighteen birthday the year before (some of them were still in high school). My best hometown friend joined us that night, adding a Y-chromosome to the undertaking. We took him to the basement, inducted him into the BA Society and then agreed to forget we ever had, when we retroactively decided the BA should be a tits-only kind of deal.

My mother made the most decadent pasta dish (it involved so much cheese) she could envision for a mostly vegetarian table. We ate. We had cake. We woke the next morning and everyone agreed to look the other way as I lapsed out of vegetarianism and into pure hedonism with heaping plates of oysters.

Surprise: The BA Society lived on, long after my birthday, long after half of us transferred away from Women’s College at the end of Freshman Year. We had a BA Society reunion in winter of 1998, at which we got wildly drunk on airplane bottles of booze at L’s apartment. Two BAs ended up in Austin. One ended up moving in with me, almost eight years after we met. She would eventually move to Asheville, about exactly a decade after visiting for the first time on my 19th birthday. At time of writing, it’s about twenty-three years later and I keep up, with varying degrees of regularity, with every single member of the BA Society. Three of us met up for coffee over the holidays, two of us shared a 40th birthday jaunt to the Riviera and a lazy long weekend of cocktails and chocolate just last week. It’s tempting to credit this to social media and the vast nostalgia-industrial complex that binds us electronically to our pasts with humiliating Throwback Thursdays and Google-stalking high school crushes, but the BA had done a pretty solid job for more than a decade before Facebook. Which is pretty remarkable given that the BA Society only ever spent about four months with all of us in the same place. That four months seems more epic in memory, a product of the magical temporal distortion of youth,[3] but it really wasn’t such a long time to carve out the foundation of friendships spanning decades.

Best Gift: The Y-Chromosome-d member of the weekend’s festivities gifted me a mix tape, which like all of his mixtapes, was a good one. Though an obsessive mixtape maker, I rarely received them from others. Whether that was a function of most mixtape makers not liking me enough to make me a tape or a function of musically-minded people being afraid I’d hold their cloyingly juvenile and hopelessly pedestrian tastes against them, I cannot rightly say. I always admired the friends that went for it, because they were the ones who trusted me to listen, even to things I didn’t think I liked, and try to hear them the way they did.

Also, my mother bought me a black leather motorcycle jacket, which briefly made me feel like the coolest person in the world.

[1] My eighteenth birthday was really good, quite poignant and, when I considered writing about it, way more complicated to recount in retrospect. Maybe I’ll tell you about it one of these days.

[2] To my 18-year-old mind having a raw bar AND a fruit bar AND a Belgian Waffle Bar AND a guy in a lampshade toque doing custom omelets AND a waiter that would totally turn a blind eye if your Mom ordered you a mimosa was the very pinnacle of luxury.

[3] If I had one superpower, it would be time manipulation, so I could slow down, hasten, rewind or pause time as needed. If I had two superpowers, they would be time manipulation and the ability to change the song to whatever I think of whenever I enter a room.